5 Steps To Stop People Pleasing
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All right, team. Welcome back to the Man Talk Show. Connor Beaton here. Today, we're going to be talking about the five steps that you can take to end your people-pleasing. And I'm going to actually talk about what creates the people-pleasing habit and what

and sort of mindset and behavior. And then I talk about why it might be the most detrimental thing to your sense of self-worth and your relationships. And then I share with you how you can break free from it. So look in the description below and there's a free guide there for you on how to develop self-worth as a man. Now, I've seen so many men struggle with self-worth and I've put together a great resource for you that is free for you to just work on that self-worth. So check it out in

the description below. Okay, let's dive in. What the heck is people pleasing? Why does this even matter? Why is it so important? Why do so many people struggle with it? Well, first and foremost, people pleasing is really an attachment-based issue where you learned in your childhood, growing up, in your family system,

that other people's needs were more relevant and more important than yours. You may have learned that in order to get your needs met, you actually had to over-prioritize somebody else's needs. You had to make mom happy and ensure that she was fully taken care of, or you had to

The very common one is you had to make sure that everything was perfect for dad in order to get a good job or a little bump on the shoulder. So people pleasers are sometimes people that have grown up in an environment where love was performance-based, love was very conditioned and conditional on how well you performed.

And so you learn that in order for me to get my needs met, I have to perform perfectly in my relationships in order for me to get any type of love or validation or acceptance or appreciation. I just need to perform really, really well, which causes you to over-function.

in the relationship. And that over-functioning is sort of this chronic frenzy where you are constantly trying to take care of the other person so that hopefully it'll be reciprocated. And that's really the dynamic for a people pleaser. I'm going to do this for you so that hopefully it's reciprocated. And sometimes with people pleasers, they don't say what they want. They don't say what they need. You might find yourself being this sort of

hoping that your partner is a mind reader, right? Like maybe my wife will, through osmosis, figure out exactly what I want and need if I just take out the garbage right on time and wash the dishes and do all the things for her, solve her problems and file her taxes. And maybe, maybe then she'll figure out what I want and need.

So that's kind of in the mindset of a people pleaser. Where it comes from is, you know, there's many, many, many different

versions of this. I've given you a couple of them. There's actually two I'm going to speak on specifically. One is when you as a boy were parentified, meaning you were put in a position where you had to take on more responsibility than you should have as a boy. You're paying bills at eight and nine. You are having to take care of siblings and really oversee them in ways that you absolutely should not. Maybe you had to dish out punishment or whatever it is.

but you are put in a parental role. The other one that I want to talk about is if you as a boy grew up in a household with a single mom. Now, caveat to this, obviously there's some phenomenal single moms out there. This isn't to hate on you, okay?

That said, many of the people pleasers that I have seen that are men, many of them, it is because of this dynamic with mom. And in a single parent household, in a single mom household, what can happen is a couple things. Number one, that mother may have struggled, your mom may have struggled to know how to deal with your intensity and your energy. And so she shamed the living bejesus out of you and she guilted you. Or number

She got you to operate in a way where you met all of her needs first, and then she'd give you the carrot, right? It's like, rub mommy's feet and do the dishes and vacuum. And this is what good boys do. And then love would come, praise would come. Then maybe you'd get some of your needs met, right? You'd get a treat. You'd get something along those lines.

And this created a non-reciprocal form of your needs being prioritized. It was like, your needs aren't actually a priority, but if you do all these things, then I'll give you what you want.

And that can happen quite a bit with the mother-son dynamic because things like disciplining that boy, getting him to take risks, et cetera, can be quite challenging for a mom. And there's research to back this up, right? Generally, kids give mothers like 800% times more difficulty than they give dads, right?

And so, but that can happen. So what I want you to start to look at in a second here, and what I want you to just cue up for you is what are some of the origins of your people-pleasing tendencies, okay?

When did you have to sacrifice or shut down your own needs and wants? Maybe whenever you expressed what you wanted or needed, it was made fun of, you were ridiculed from your parents, maybe they would guilt you, maybe they would blow up, they would get angry, you know, you would say, hey, I want to watch some TV tonight and, you know, they would ridicule.

rant off about how terrible you were that day. And so you didn't get to watch it, but you basically learned that your needs had to get put on the shelf. So when did you start to learn that your needs had to get put on a shelf?

uh, that they were not a priority. And two, whose needs did you have to prioritize growing up? Whose needs were sort of the, the black hole of the family or they were the sun, you know, all the needs sort of revolved around them. Uh,

The last thing that I want to say is that you might be a people pleaser, and I didn't say this part before, but I think it's an important asterisk to sort of put in. You might be a people pleaser because of some very real trauma in childhood that sort of diminished your sense of self-worth, and with your self-worth, it coincides our needs.

So if you have a very low sense of self-esteem and self-worth, your needs sort of coincide with that. And so the thought that you should ask for what you want or ask for what you need or even pursue those things may have been interrupted because of some trauma, whether you experienced some type of abuse or really severe or just real neglect or some type of abandonment happened.

that caused you to think, I'm bad, I'm wrong, I caused this, and so what I want doesn't matter because I'm bad or I'm a bad person. That's also a very, very common contributing factor that can lead to you as a people pleaser because you take on this unconscious perspective that what I want and need is bad because who I am is bad. What I want and need is bad because who I am is bad. So

The two basic people-pleasing challenges and why it's really detrimental, and I'm going to move into what you do, is basically that you over-prioritize somebody else's needs in order to hopefully get yours met. And this continues to reinforce a diminishment of your sense of self-worth because what you're doing is saying, my needs aren't of equal importance to other people's.

And in order for me to even have a chance to get mine heard or listened to, I have to take care of theirs first. Now, that might be reinforcing an already diminished sense of self-worth, or it can just be contributing to it, right? Either one.

So what do you do? How do you start to break out of this? Well, number one, like I was saying before, begin to understand the origins of your people-pleasing tendencies. So number one, where did it come from? Who contributed to it? When did you learn that your needs were less important

And whose needs did you think were of most importance? Whose needs were the most important in your household growing up? How did you try and get your needs met growing up? What would happen when you tried to get your needs met growing up? What would happen if you wouldn't meet your primary caretaker's needs? Now, what I want to say is that in most family systems,

There's usually, usually, not always, but there's usually like one culprit, either mom or dad or a step-parent,

that is really like their needs are the one that matters most to everybody else around them. So I want you to try and identify the one person whose needs really did matter and everybody had to cater to them or take care of them because otherwise, you know, the system would fall apart or all hell would break loose. That person would become unmanageable. So really get a sense of who was that person whose needs

we needed to cater to or I needed to cater to. Number two, identify your people-pleasing triggers and tendencies. So what activates this desire inside of you to people-please, to park your needs and over-prioritize somebody else's? I'm going to give you two things that I've seen quite commonly, and then you have to explore more on your own. But number one is anytime that there's a sign of conflict,

Usually people pleasers will try and resolve that conflict by over-prioritizing their partner's needs or the other person's needs. And second is when the other person is disappointed in them or when you think that somebody else is disappointed in you, a boss, a friend.

your girlfriend, your wife, et cetera, your partner, in those moments, you probably move into a place of let me take care of everything for them to try and make up for the fact that they're disappointed in me. So this is going to give you some insight into step number three or four here in a second. But then start to look at the tendencies. What are your tendencies? What do you do

to try and meet other people's needs so that you get yours reciprocated? Is it a tendency of yours to not communicate what you want and need and hope that they just figure it out? Is it a tendency that whenever you're trying to meet your partner's needs or your girlfriend or your wife's needs,

that you are spending money that's beyond your means. You're saying yes to things that you don't want to. So what are the tendencies that show up? How does your people pleasing actually show up? What does it look like? What does it sound like? You might have a phrase

Like, yes, honey, you know, or yes, dear, or whatever it is that you hear yourself say whenever you're moved into that people-pleasing habit. So start to identify what does my people-pleasing tendencies look like, sound like, what do I do, what do I say, and really start to flush some of that out.

The next step is to start practice saying no. Start to practice saying no. You probably heard this sort of cliche saying that no is a whole sentence. But what I want you to start to do is start to say no to just the small things first. Little things like, hey, do you want to go for Thai food tonight?

Check in with yourself. No, actually, I don't want that at all. Not interested in Thai food tonight. So start to say no to small things and then you move up to bigger things, right? Do you want to go on the trip this year to whatever, right? Lake Tahoe. I don't know why that was. I've never actually even been to Lake Tahoe. Maybe I secretly want to go. Maybe that's the thing. But start to say no in small ways and then in larger incremental ways.

The next step is prioritize your own needs. Start to prioritize your own needs. And as you do that, and this might be a challenge for you at first because you might not know what your needs are fundamentally, but there's some very basic things. What type of connection do you want?

What type of communication do you want? What type of intimacy do you want? What kind of shared experiences do you want to have? What type of adventures do you want to go on? What types of experiences do you want to have?

All of those things can be very helpful, right? Like for me, I'll give you an example. When my wife and I got married, we were talking about our honeymoon and she was like, I just want to go lay on a beach and that's all that I really want to do. And I was like, I don't really have any interest in that at all. I want to go climb a mountain. And I really wanted to go and hike up in Patagonia in Chile, Torres del Paine. And

And so we accommodated one another. We actually didn't end up on a beach at all. We ended up going to Buenos Aires, but it was hot as hell there. So it kind of worked out. But we ended up spending the first week literally climbing some mountains in Torres del Paine. It was absolutely beautiful. My wife had a phenomenal time. She had some resistance to it at first because she wasn't sure because she had never done anything like that. But that was me really prioritizing, here's what I desire. Here's what I would really like and voicing that.

And it took a while for us to talk about it. Like, you know, it probably took a month or two for us to decide what we were going to do for our honeymoon. And part of that was like, well, where do we want to go and what do we want it to look like? My vision was, you know, intense at the base of the mountain, right?

Her vision was, hell no, not on our honeymoon. And that was totally fine. Where we stayed didn't matter as much to me as the fact that we were going to go and do it. So you have to start to communicate, prioritize your own needs, and you have to prioritize your own needs in the things that you need to do for you.

So what do you know you need to do for you that you are chronically compromising? Maybe it's going to the gym. Maybe it's journaling. Maybe it's meditating. Maybe it's calling your parents once a week. I don't know what it is for you. But what are the things that you consistently seem to put aside in order to try and appease somebody else? The next piece, the last piece, is start to set and establish some very clear boundaries.

Boundaries teach other people how to treat you, okay? And the hallmark of the people pleaser is that they don't really, well, not that they don't have a sense of who they are, but they struggle to know who they are. And this is what I've seen so many times,

People pleasing men very often struggle to be able to identify whether or not they're in the right relationship with the right person. And that usually happens because there's no boundaries in place. There's no pushback. There's no, here's what I want and need, and can you meet my wants and needs?

So as you start to set some boundaries in the relationship, right? That's not okay with me. I didn't like the way that you spoke to me when you said that. It's not okay for me when, you know, when we get into conflict for you to call me names, you start to set some boundaries like that in a relationship. And suddenly the other person begins to reveal more of who they truly are. So boundaries teach others how to treat you, but boundaries also teach you who that person is. And

they might fly off the handle and escalate and start throwing dinner plates at you, right? Probably not a relationship you want to be in. Or they might say, hey, thank you so much for telling me you're right. I stepped over the line. And maybe they might not be able to do that exactly in that moment when you're setting the boundary, but they come back to it. They circle around. They're able to say, hey, thank you so much. I appreciate you sharing that with me. And thank you for setting that boundary with me. You were right. I crossed the line and I'm sorry.

So boundaries are reciprocal in the sense that they teach others where you stand and you begin to get a sense of where do they actually stand. The bonus here, after prioritizing your needs, establishing a clear boundary, being able to say no, is you're going to have to challenge your self-talk, your self-criticism. One of the hallmarks of people pleasers is that their internal dialogue, your internal dialogue, is personal.

almost always heinous. There's just no way around it. Because in order to not get your needs met or vocalize your needs or vocalize your wants and your desires,

you have to have a fairly negative self-perception of either who you are or what you need. And this is very indicative of the childhood that we oftentimes experience when we become people pleasers. And those two things of I am bad, so what I need is bad,

go hand in hand. So the way that you speak to yourself through this process is really going to matter. You are going to have to be rigorous with practicing the things that I've laid out for you here, saying no, setting boundaries, prioritizing what you want with that inner critic.

you're going to have to start to set a boundary with that inner critic. And that might sound something like, as soon as the inner critic starts to chirp, don't ask for what you want. Don't say those things. You literally interrupt and say, I'm not going to speak to myself like that. I'm not speaking to myself like that anymore. My needs matter, right? What I want matters.

And this is a process that I call autocorrect. I can do a larger video on it, but you start to autocorrect the language and the conversation that's happening inside of you and shape it in a more meaningful direction in a way that is going to serve you.

And this really helps to combat some of the shame and some of the pain of the very thing that created that people-pleasing tendency and tactic within you. Because remember, people-pleasing, it's just a tactic. It's a strategy that you developed in your youth.

for better or for worse, to try and get what you wanted and needed met. And now, as an adult, you are going to work on overcoming that so that you can value what you want and you need. You can start to prioritize that for yourself and you can begin to communicate that in your relationship effectively and hopefully have that reciprocated.

So comment below, let me know what you're going to be putting into action. And as always, don't forget to man it forward and I'll see you next week. Connor Beaton signing off.